The Orient in Portuguese Literature

Of all the events that shaped

the cultural identity of the Portuguese,

one of the richest and most important is, undoubtedly,

their widespread presence in the East. More so than any other

European country, this has left an indelible mark

on the culture of Portugal

A glimpse in the museums, manor-houses or even the wealthy homes of Portugal is enough to gain unmistakable and immediate proof of this in the ceramics, cloths, furniture, jewellery and many other kind of craftsmanship and arts. Even the Portuguese vocabulary has been enriched with words from Indian, Malay, Chinese and Japanese, with botanical species transplanted to Portugal and even with some culinary specialities.

But this presence is particularly evident in one specific area. The literary texts which show the contribution which the Orient made to the Portuguese imagination are so numerous and impressive that they deserve some moments of reflection.

On the one hand, and from much more distant times than in the cases of England, Holland or France, the extent of the Asian continent seems to correspond, as far as volume and pioneer importance, to the large amount of Portuguese works which evoke India, Malaysia, China, Japan and even Mongolia and Tibet with their different geography and weather, customs, beliefs, political systems, flora and fauna, architecture, etc..

On the other hand, there is relatively little pictorial evidence although it did exist as is proved by the recently published volume titled Imagens do Oriente no Século XVI which shows exotic figures from a Portuguese codex kept in the Casanatense Library in Rome. But as we said, because pictorial evidence is scarce, any descriptions are on the whole those which are written. And, with all its might, the written word has fulfilled its aim perfectly: to translate, in the most meaningful way, the fascination of those who by necessity or will dared to go to those distant lands and deliver to the rest of the world its splendour and its differences.

There can be no doubt that, during the centuries, that evidence did not always appear with the same frequency, the same force or in the same literary form. Nor is it difficult to point out some of the reasons here. A more difficult task is that of explaining them clearly because the three different factors that condition this diversity may function simultaneously or at different times separately, both or together. The three above-mentioned factors are historical intertext, literary style and function, and direct or sometimes indirect knowledge of exotic countries. So, a historical moment may require a certain literary style; the physical presence may turn out, in exceptional cases, to be unfruitful or to be less fertile than the imagination; in certain moments, each one of the above-mentioned aspects may be united with the others. Anyway, whether I am successful or not, I intend to provide something more than a mere chronological inventory of the endless available material.

The initial contact with highly civilized people with their own art and philosophy, their own wealth and own customs produced, as could be expected, literature which was predominantly informative and descriptive which fits into the so-called " travel " literature. In fact, there are a lot of guide-books, letters, itineraries, reports and even treaties referring to facts, things and men of the "pestana do mundo" ("eyelash of the world") according to the expression used by Fernão Mendes Pinto who, sensitive to the picturesque metaphors of the oriental languages, learned the expression from local writers and translated it into Portuguese. All those who described voyages and adventures show the same curiosity, the same gift for recollecting, the same concern with describing every detail of the customs which were different from those of their homeland, the same precision in describing events and even the same frankness in showing their weaknesses, cruelties or mistakes. Pioneer reporters, we could even call them photo-reporters because of the clarity of the images which they presented, they shortened distances, opened new perspectives on the world, gave words an original and authentic meaning. They contradicted the old saying "Longas vias, mui longas mentiras" ("great distances, even greater lies") refering to the exaggerated descriptions which could not be controlled from afar. The Portuguese told and described neither lies nor fiction but the truth. It is reality and that is enough. The fact that their writings are full of what was experienced and what was observed fills the reader's mind with the wonder of original events and his imagination with surprise and astonishment. It must also be said that if Fernão Mendes Pinto, the most remarkable of them all has also been called a liar, that unfair legend was born not so much because of a fading memory, quite acceptable in an old man recalling his wanderings from the Indian to the Pacific Ocean, but much more because of the evident ill will of the Jesuits due to the fact that Fernão Mendes Pinto left the Society after remaining in it for only a short time.

As well as exotic revelations, those texts give us a fairly large hint as to the character and behaviour of the writers themselves. Their strikingly unique qualities leave us speechless. First of all, they have unlimited curiosity. Whether they were missionaries, traders, civil servants or adventurers, they did more than fulfill their tasks. The priest speaks, of course, of evangelization, but he also takes note of social and geographical details, customs, houses and clothing which he sees every day. In his turn, the trader is not only aware of things which bring profit: he also makes psychological observations or describes the Great Wall of China or the Hindu temples in detail; he even dares to reconstruct the ancient and modern history of the countries he has travelled with the information at his disposal. In this point, all of them try, some more than others, to understand the local languages in order to get as much information as possible through documents or conversations. The most striking example of that will to communicate is in Peregrinaçao where, frequently, the writer names Chinese products, posts or institutions and gives us, simultaneously, the equivalent in Portugal in a literal, picturesque translation.

They also prove to be very courageous when confronting the unknown, with its countless dangers, illnesses, prisons, bad treatment or unstable weather. We are amazed when we read the outcome of a painful ascent in the mountains of Tibet in Novo Descobrimento do Gram Cathayo. This account relates the journey made by a small group of people without the proper equipment facing the snow, cold enough to cause gangrene in the feet and the hands, the blindness which threatened the members of the expedition, the solidarity of the men who refused to abandon their leader Father António de Andrade. Despite all the difficulties of the journey, the father, exhausted and crippled, recorded the kind of food the few inhabitants ate, the fact that women sowed while the men spun, the similarity of certain beliefs of the lamas with Christianity and the products bought by the trading neighbours.

For the readers of those times, these reports were an endless catalogue of marvels never before seen, generally accompanied by flattering commentaries about the highly organized administration, the distribution of goods to the needy, the strict and impartial justice and even the clever solutions to promote wealth and well-being. But contemporary readers are not only just as interested as earlier readers but are also amazed at the early existence of market distribution which has only been adopted in Europe in the 20th century. An example of this is the section in Peregrinação when the author mentions the variety of businesses which existed in the Celestial Empire and talks about the rearing of ducks. Some people reared ducks for everyday needs, others had ten to twelve thousand ducks to be slaughtered for meat whilst others specialised in the sale of eggs. It is a natural and salutary surprise to know that the existence of battery farms was, in the China of some four hundred years ago, a lucrative business.

Finally, the travel-writers proved to have unusually catholic minds. They observed and accepted foreign customs with impartial serenity except, sometimes, those which concerned rituals, superstitions and the multiplicity of sects. We must remember, however, that this was not the result of deep religious faith alone. The watchful eye of the Board of Censors required the discrete reaffirmation of orthodoxy.

Anyway, judging from their novelty value and from the vivid experiences which they relate, these writings still exercise a fascination which cannot be matched by other works written by non-travelling authors and by those with second-hand information. Take, for example, the Miscelânia by Garcia de Resende and the ballads he dedicated to the newly discovered worlds. Due to the fact that the collector of the Cancioneiro did not see those distant lands for himself, his description is based on recollections either of other, earlier texts or of the many oral reports by those who came back, mere sailors like the one in Auto da Índia by Gil Vicente or others of a higher social class. Thus, his description misses that shiver of surprise, the direct confrontation with reality. He just enumerates the rubies, diamonds, sapphires and emeralds and also the eastern customs concerning sex, burial rites, castes and ways of government without commenting on any customs of which the European mind was ignorant or which it rejected. He simply criticises and attacks the social and moral changes in a people whose adventurous spirit was the victim of greed, conspiracies and the disintegration of traditional values.

The peaceful literature full of news and facts of which we have spoken up to now was to undergo another development and take on a different aspect when the invasions, the demand for contributions and competition with other merchants created conflicts and wars. The mistake made by the Crown and by many of its representatives was to fail to consider the East with the admiration due to civilizations much older than ours but to see it rather as a place from which wealth could be extracted and which they would have to defend with guns.

And those who witnessed or heard of the victories and defeats became aware that it was imperative to preserve some record of the deeds and their protagonists. Hence, the 16th century witnessed an amazing outburst of chroniclers of the overseas expansion who set down the sieges and combats, heroic deeds and sufferings, prowesses and malice, giving history a new perspective which was often intensified by the direct participation of the narrator. João de Barros, Diogo do Couto, Afonso de Albuquerque, Duarte Barbosa, Castanheda are some of those who recalled and ennobled those events which were fresh in their memory. Of course, the desire to heighten the nation's glories often led them to dismiss the opponent's greatness. But it was not always like that. The deeds were given significance only through their own setting - the lands and seas of the Rising Sun - and in opposition to the enemies whom they considered to be courageous.

After a proper pause, the maritime adventures and heroic acts were no longer only History but rather they became an Epic, a magnifying glass for the glories of the people. There can be no doubt that Camões portrays the mythical summit of this glorification in Os Lusíadas not only because he glorifies the unquestionable virtues and moments of plenitude but also due to the genius of many of his verses and the superior and universal sense he gave to his epic poem.

As could be expected, this final, irreplaceable splendour was lost when the various injuries committed began to threaten the Portuguese reputation and put their presence in those territories at risk. The warning sounded by Diogo do Couto in Soldado Prático and even more in Cartas was not enough to prevent the ruin in spite of its strong words and good sense. We must look not only to the negative side-effects of losing independence and the greedy desire of other nations to colonize but also to the irresponsible and unpunished behaviour of some "despots" which jeopardised the legitimacy of Portuguese presence in the East in order to explain the ensuing silence and decadence. In spite of this there were still some voices to be heard in the post-Camões period. Among them was that of Francisco de Sá e Meneses whose Malaca Conquistada, rather than being an exotic, knowledgeable epic set in the Orient, was no more than a clumsy attempt to build up his fellow countrymen with a dose of patriotism which was sorely lacking towards the end of the Spanish occupation.

The gap became even more evident in the following century. The emotional links with the East became weaker and weaker for the reasons which have already been pointed out and also because of a growing interest in the Brasilian Eldorado. This historical eclipse is related to a literary eclipse. In one of his essays, Ribeiro Sanches mentions "the three thinking counsellors of China" who held tight control over the executive council and he advised Portugal to follow this healthy example. In this respect, the literature of the European Enlightment used the political or mental patterns from the Near and Far East which, as well as being colourful, had the advantage of allowing the author to make a covert criticism of domestic institutions. However, there is no evidence of a genuine connection between the 18th Century mind and the Orient.

Surprisingly enough, the pre-Romantics and the Romantics show the same lack of contact, as much those who came to the Orient as those who stayed in Europe. Nothing could be more pertinent than Bocage's reference to the Indian landscape:

Do Mandovi na margem reclinado

Chorei debalde minha negra sina...

Reposing on the banks of the Mandovi

In vain I shed tears over my fate...

Garrett, in his own work titled Camões, in which he presents the poet's life, makes use of placenames picked up from Os Lusíadas in a highly peculiar way. He devotes a long chapter at the beginning of the poem to Jau for no other reason than to condemn the racial and social prejudices held by the captain, a nobleman, who is opposed to allowing the slave on board the vessel which will take them to Lisbon. It is also done to heighten the compassion shown by Camões himself and the faithful devotion of his humble servant. Along the same Romantic lines, the glories of days gone by are used only to make an odious comparison with the frivolous fighting and oppressions of the present. The role of the poet himself is, in this case, given more emphasis than that of the sailors and generals whose praises Camões sang. After having given him a stipend, D. Sebastião wanted to know if Camões was of the same stock as Vasco da Gama or Afonso de Albuquerque and he received the following answer:

Fez mais do que eles,

Que os tornou imortais...

He did yet more than they

For he made them immortal

Nevertheless, the predominant idea in Camões and Garrett is that any mistakes which were made, just as the changing winds of fortune, would cancel the position which had been gained.

This gap as regards both ethnic and cultural exotica reached its peak with the Generation of '70. In Causas da Decadência dos Povos Peninsulares, Antero de Quental makes repeated reference to India and the negative consequences of an imperialist policy which transformed Portugal into a country which received wealth from afar without developing any of her own resources or encouraging work or initiatives which should have been the basis of that wealth. However, he completely disregards everything which enriched the Portuguese collective subconscious.

The situation is slightly different with Eça de Queirós. To give a concrete example, in O Mandarim he offers an interesting solution to the paradox between this style of writing and the lack of direct experience on the authors' part. It is a well known fact that Realism attempted to portray reality in the most honest and substantiated way possible. In view of the fact that Eça had gone no further than the Suez Canal, he was unable to put this criterion into practice in the parts of his book which deal with China. However, his description of China has a oneiric, fantastical quality which excuses Eça, to some extent, from the rules of Realism. It is still evident that he had read some material in order to grasp a little of the local colour. However, the way he depicts China is painful. Either this is the product of stereotypes such as those which most people hold of foreign lands or it is a hotchpotch of facts drawn from guide books of the period or the communiqués of the fin-de-siècle news agencies. Who can tell if Camilo Pessanha was also thinking of this Romantic when he declared that Europeans only "know the Chinese from the magician's box of tricks" or from "carved ivory knick-knacks"? Classing this mockery along with the newspaper reports, Teodoro is to speak straightforwardly of the decay of the Middle Kingdom, of the starving, louse-ridden masses, of the different foods but he remains "stubbornly indifferent" to the landscape, he declines to go to Nanking and Peking. As the author has taken care to tell us in the preface to the book, this is the work of dreams and not reality and as the dream is worked by a graduate from Coimbra which is equivalent, in Eça's terms, to an ignorant, superficial man, we can assume that the literary trend has not been betrayed and that this stereotyped view is not shocking.

At the turn of the 20th Century, some writers took a renewed interest in the Orient. Two writers stand out in this move, both of whom lived in these parts for a considerable number of years. Although they were contemporary with each other, Camilo Pessanha and Wenceslau de Morais were similar to each other only in so far as they both adopted certain customs from China or Japan and in that they both had a certain affinity with far eastern philosophy and the oriental mentality. Wenceslau de Morais' stay in Macau and later in Japan was reflected in the publication of chronicles, essays and novels almost all of which focussed on Japan in the same literary current as Pierre Loti and Lafcadio Hearn. However, Wenceslau de Morais had but a few literary techniques at his disposal and his work represents little more than a series of impressions and personal experiences. Quite the opposite is the case of Camilo Pessanha, a writer who was master of existential anguish and literary refinement. Even so, his poetry is not where evidence of his life in the Orient is to be seen. To judge from the dates on the Clepsidra poems which make explicit reference to China, they were written prior to his arrival in Macau. The "nasal chit-chat" in Viola Chinesa or the comparisons in Lúbrica where the poet attempts to clasp his beloved as he would a snake "from the tropical forests of Asia" and breathe in the aroma of her dress:

Como os ébrios chineses, delirantes

Respiram, a dormir, o fumo inquieto

Que o seu longo cachimbo predilecto

No ambiente espalhava pouco antes

Like the delirious, drunken Chinese

Who, asleep, inhale the restive smoke

Which their favourite pipe

Puffed out a little time before…

are details based merely on literary recollections of the Decadents or the Symbolists. It is his volume of prose works, China - Estudos e Traduções, which reflects his twenty years of cohabitation with the Chinese in an array of articles, talks and translations. Quite different from Fernão Mendes Pinto who saw China at its peak, Camilo Pessanha was introduced to that country after many years of decline. Nor can we fail to be surprised at the agility of some of these texts by a poet who had previous links with the Orient and who ended up finding an escape from nothingness in opium. His is a true indictment against ignorance, poverty, the superstitions and servile civility of the "yellow hell" which rests beneath his glance, the ruins of Portugal's former grandeur. His anger only dies down when he deals with the literature or art of this ancient culture, or when he translates some of the poets or philosophers into Portuguese. In this respect the collection of Chinese art which he made and then donated to the Machado de Castro Museum and for which he himself wrote the catalogue is a much more eloquent witness than words could ever be of what it was that the poet loved and admired in his oriental exile.

Modernist poetry owes little or nothing to the oriental imagination as such. Nevertheless, there are two reasons to be interested in Álvaro de Campos' poem "Opiário". Firstly, it confers a negative responsibility for the past onto an absurd present:

Pertenço a um género de portugueses

Que depois de estar a Índia descoberta

Ficaram sem trabalho...

I am one of a kind of Portuguese

Who, once India was discovered,

Were left jobless...

Later on, as Pessoa claimed never to have seen anything past the African coast of the Indian Ocean, and the Suez Canal (where the poem was dated), he states his opinion, paradoxical as ever:

não vale a pena ter

Ido ao Oriente e visto a Índia e a China,

going to the Orient and seeing India and China wasn't worth it,

for the opium which his heteronym smokes in order to escape the pain of being alive transports him to "um Oriente ao oriente do Oriente" ("an Orient to the East of the Orient"). In this poem "orient" means everything yet nothing.

Increasingly giving way to his literary and intellectual propensities, the poet gives it a meaning with no context existing on a purely mental plane.

To close this short examination of the significance of the Orient in Portuguese literature I shall mention one last work, O Senhor Ventura, by Miguel Torga. We do not find here a China with which the author has previous acquaintance. The setting, however, is a paradigm or emblem of all the places to which the hero has been led by his adventurous spirit exactly like those places with which so many Portuguese were confronted in the past and on which their creative imagination set to work.

"Union-Disunion'- (32cm x 39cm) - Kwok Woon

*Lecturer in Literature in the Faculty of Arts at Coimbra University.